MPAA Wants Congress to ‘Encourage’ 3 Strikes, Filtering

The Motion Picture Association of America wants Congress to “encourage” internet providers to filter out pirated movies, and to punish customers who repeatedly engage in piracy with a “graduated response” that might include disconnection from the net.

The nation’s motion picture lobbying group floated the ideas in a 35-page lobbying letter to the Federal Communications Commission on Friday. The FCC is drafting recommendations to Congress for a national broadband plan.

“Working in cooperation with ISPs, MPAA’s member studios and other creators can utilize a variety of technological tools and policy approaches to address the threat of unlawful conduct online,” reads the MPAA’s letter (.pdf) .

“These efforts, which include graduated response policies as well as technologies such as watermarking and filtering, have proven to be successful in various contexts,” the group continues. “MPAA strongly urges the commission to recommend that Congress encourage multiple efforts to deter unlawful activity” and to refrain from enacting a policy that would limit the MPAA’s options.

The FCC letter is the second time the studios have publicly embraced internet filtering. But it’s the first time Hollywood has officially endorsed a “graduated response” policy, more commonly referred to as a three-strikes program. Among other things, such a policy could require ISPs to halt service to repeated copyright infringers.

The MPAA said it was not immediately prepared to comment on the letter, which comes as other countries, including South Korea, France, Sweden, Great Britain and Spain are enacting or openly contemplating three strikes measures.

The FCC’s final recommendations to Capitol Hill should urge “that content creators and ISPs be encouraged to develop the best available solutions — even though it is impossible today to identify what all of those solutions may look like,” the MPAA argued. “Whether in the form of forensic tools or policies designed to discourage consumers from engaging in unlawful conduct, the government should give private industry-wide latitude to find effective strategies.”

Toward that goal, the group’s lobbying letter asks the FCC to review broadband policy of other nations, including South Korea. In April, Korean lawmakers allowed for the termination of a copyright infringer’s internet access for up to six months, and also called for shuttering websites and message boards transmitting infringing content.

“South Korea ignored the problems of intellectual property crimes for far too long, but fortunately, it is no longer sitting idly by as theft ravages its creative industry,” the MPAA wrote.

The MPAA’s counterpart, the Recording Industry Association of America, is also pushing U.S.-based ISPs for a three-strikes plan, but has been largely unsuccessful as network providers await government guidance on the issue.

Public Knowledge, a digital rights group in Washington, D.C., counters that filters designed to detect copyrighted data are unable to differential between pirated content and content that’s authorized or constitutes a fair use of the material. Public Knowledge spokesman Art Brodsky says filtering amounts to a privacy breach as well.

“You don’t break into peoples’ houses to see if people have stolen books,’ Brodsky says. “This is an assumption of guilt that they have to look through everybody’s bits.”

The MPAA’s lobbying effort is in response to the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, the $800 billion bailout package that included a $7 billion investment in broadband. The measure requires the FCC to recommend to Congress by February how best to revamp American broadband policy.

Of dozens of comments to the FCC on the topic, the MPAA’s proposal is the least consumer friendly, Brodsky says.